Raymond Stallings

Professor Ray Stallings became Director of Research in 2012, after having joined RCSI as the Chair of Cancer Genetics in 2007. Professor Stallings has held faculty and scientific leadership positions at a number of major research centres, hospitals and universities in Ireland and the United States, including the University of Texas Health Science Centre at San Antonio, University College Dublin, Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital, Dublin, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of California, and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston. An author and co-author of over 180 journal articles, books, and book chapters, Prof. Stallings is an internationally recognised leader in the area of cancer genomics and is the recipient of many major peer-reviewed grant awards from national and international sources. Ray’s current research is focused on the development of novel therapeutic approaches for the treatment of the childhood cancer neuroblastoma.

Raymond Stallings

Director of Research and Innovation & Professor of Cancer Genetics, Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland

Summary: Neuroblastoma is a childhood cancer caused by the abnormal growth and development of neural crest cells. The disease commonly affects children age 5 years or younger. Approximately 50% of children have cancer cells that have migrated to distant sites in the body and formed tumour masses at the time of diagnosis. The main challenge in treating neuroblastoma is to combat tumour metastasis and development of resistance to multiple chemotherapeutic drugs. Despite major advances in available therapies, children with drug resistant and/or recurrent neuroblastoma have a dismal outlook with 5-year survival rates of less than 20%. This project aims to develop biomarkers of tumour response to drugs that might be used to help select patients for treatment, and identify novel targets for the development of more effective personalised therapy with anticipated improvement in clinical outcome. This work will contribute to more efficient design of re-initiation treatment, sparing patients unnecessary rounds of chemotherapy and ultimately increasing survival. The most important achievement of the research project will be contribution to a panel of circulating biomarkers that will be prospectively analysed in the next SIOPEN high-risk trial. These new circulating markers will benefit children with high-risk neuroblastoma whose tumours have relapsed, leading to less harmful and more tailored treatment options.

The list of publications below is automatically derived from MEDLINE/PubMed. As a result, there may be incorrect or missing publications.